Young married men make more money than single men do

Along with hard work, education, smart investing and a myriad other factors to which Millionaires attribute their financial success, they might want to consider adding marriage.

A new study conducted by W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and Robert Lerman, an economics professor at American University, finds that married men work harder and earn more money than their single counterparts who may be just as qualified.

A substantial majority of Millionaires (85%) are married, according to a new Spectrem Group wealth level study of households with a net worth between $1 million and $4.9 million, not including primary residence. Of these, more than half (53%) make their financial decisions jointly with their spouse.

Is there a correlation between marital status and wealth level? Yes, the Wilcox and Lerman study finds. Married men ages 28-30 make $15,900 more their single counterparts, while married men between 44 and 46 years old make $18,800 more than single men of the same ages.

They are also working more hours; around 400 more a year than single men of comparable educational achievement and similar economic classes.

Men are transformed by marriage, Wilcox wrote in The Washington Post. They are motivated to maximize their income to better support their spouse and family. They also benefit from the advice and encouragement of their wives, "who have an obvious interest in their success," he writes. Another benefit to marriage is that employers tend to prefer and promote men who are married with children. This was the basis for a 1960s sitcom, "Occasional Wife," in which a man, told "no marriage, no promotion," pretended to be married to his single neighbor.

The Wilcox and Lerman report further posits that "declines in the propensity to marry, along with normative shifts in the acceptability of nonmarital births and fatherlessness, have led to major declines in stable two-parent families, which in turn have exacerbated problems of poverty, increased inequality, and weakened opportunities for economic mobility… We find that men and women who hail from an intact family (where both parents are present) are more likely to flourish in the contemporary workplace and to enjoy an 'intact-family premium.'"